I used their trial for a bit to test it out with Vorta [1] in a container. Vorta (and Borg) seemed to work fine, until I wanted to restore an archive and I noticed that my recent snapshots were completely empty. Probably because of a misconfiguration on my end though. But it made me look elsewhere. For me backups should be a fire, test and forget solution.
Recently I made the switch to Kopia [2] which seems to have feature parity with Borg (and Restic [3]). It also has a web UI which is way easier to work with than Vorta. And I can easily view, extract and restore individual files or folders from there. This gave me way more confidence about this solution. The only thing I really miss is that I cannot chose different targets for different paths. For instance, with Borg I was able to backup a partial of my Docker appdata to an external source. And I haven't found a way to do this with Kopia. Besides that I'm pretty happy with this solution and I would recommend it.
Nice to see HA getting some love on HN. A colleague recommended it to me about 3 years ago as an alternative to Domoticz. I've migrated back than and haven't looked back since. I consider myself a real Home Assistant enthousiast. I've contributed some small amounts to the project, created and maintain my own add-ons and love to share my configuration with others.
Although most of the things currently just work, especially with the (migrated) UI integrations. Some things still feel very unfinished, like blueprints. Which was a terrific idea, but maintaining and keeping those up to date is an absolute nightmare and you will have to that yourself [1]. Same with battery powered devices. When they work, it's all great, but having to watch their battery level is just a hassle. You can create your own automation to do that for you, but it seems unnecessary.
For me the community also sometimes feels very hostile. For instance, you can have a Portainer add-on, but installing other Docker images makes your system 'unsupported'. Same with some blacklisted images [2], which break Home Assistant Supervisor. Or when the maintainer of one of the add-ons completely ignores a breaking issue after a day [3].
This write up seems quite decent, but it just boils down to some basic stuff. Like putting a button near a new feature and choosing the right tool for selection. Which are both really valid points.
The thing I really miss in this article is accessibility. For some visually impaired users it can be beneficial to use a dropdown instead of some visual markers, which can be distracting and unusable for some.
Also the text and arrows explaining the 'design mistakes' are quite tiny, have insufficient contrast and thus do not make for a good visual experience.